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“Mediterranean Prize for Culture” to H. E Suzanne Mubarak Welcome Address We are deeply honoured and pleased to welcome you today in Naples, this twin city of Alexandria, to award you the Mediterranean Prize for Culture, a prize that the Academy awards every year to a personality or institution who has significantly worked for the promotion of culture within the “Mare Nostrum”, thus contributing in strengthening the cultural dialogue between the two sides of the Mediterranean and the search for peace among its peoples. I would like to apologize for the absence of my colleague and friend, Professor Nadir Mohamed Aziza, Secretary General of the Mediterranean Academy who was kept from being here, as he wished, by a previous engagement taken to represent our institution at the biennial world meeting organized by S. Egidio Community aiming at mobilising all religions in the service of Peace. However, from the town of Aachen, in Germany, where he is now, he addresses to you, through me, his respects and congratulations. The Mediterranean Prize for Culture awarded by our Academy means to stress the important work undertaken in Alexandria for the restoration of its library and in particular the prevailing role held by you personally in the launching of the project and its successful completion. Everybody acknowledges the outstanding place that the city of Alexandria and its Library had in the ancient Mediterranean area, since it was enabled to achieve a cultural syncretism between the spiritual depth and magnificence of the heritage of the Pharaoh’s civilization and the philosophic splendour and scientific progress of the Hellenic civilization. However, what is necessary to stress is that many different kinds of knowledge were developed within this ancient Library, and this is what gives to its cultural production such a strikingly modern multidisciplinary character. From Eudoxus of Cnidos, who divided the year into 365 days and a quarter, to Archimedes and his principle, from Aristarchus of Samos, who was the first to discover that the Earth revolved around the Sun, to Eratosthenes who first measured the circumference of the Earth, science shone with a thousand lights in the ancient Library and perhaps came to its achievement with the fundamental works of Euclid. Medicine was not less important with Galen whose work was taken over by the greatest physicians until the 17th century. Ptolemy brought a revolution in astronomy thanks to his Great Collection “Almagest” which was to be the reference work for Copernicus and Kepler. Philosophy, literature, history and geography had, in Alexandria, an unequalled development. And how can we forget to mention, before you, Mrs Mubarak, the only great woman philosopher and mathematician of this exemplary period, Hypatia, whose works have mostly disappeared but we know about her contribution thanks to her correspondence with Synesius, the Greek philosopher from Cyrene. The lesson coming from Alexandria was strikingly modern, since the emblematic city was not only the first ring of a transmission chain for knowledge, which had never dried up. It was always open to external contributions and was able to turn difference into enrichment. It is for this reason that in our time, it has been able to bring together the authors of its endogenous renaissance (the writers Tewfih al Hakim and Edouard Kharrat, the musician Sayed Darwick, the film-maker Youssef Chakine, the painter Farouk Hosni, who has been Minister of Culture, and to whom I address a warm welcome both as Minister of Culture and as founder – member of the Mediterranean Academy) and those with different cultural origins who were either born or settled in this area (the Greek Cavafy and Stakis, the British, Lawrence Durrel, the French, George Moustaki and the Italian Ungaretti), The new Bibliotheca Alexandrina is shaped as a solar disk. A good choice indeed, and how symbolic! Through your personal commitment in giving new life to the Library of Alexandria, under new forms and with proper techniques, you have contributed, with the aid of all teams working for this new institution, in making the shining disk of Aton-Rà - immortal symbol of the enlightenment of shared knowledge and the brilliant metaphor of a rediscovered Mediterranean – to emerge from the sea where it had been hidden for too long. Therefore, on behalf of Professor Nadir Mohamed Aziza, on behalf of the members of the Jury and of our Academy and myself, I say to you: Thank you. Michele Capasso President Fondazione Laboratorio Mediterraneo Torna indietro |
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